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Now that we've looked at why teenagers and students in college are going to be very unlucky in finding jobs this summer, we thought that it might be fun to look at what kind of money those who have just obtained college degrees can reasonably expect as they enter the U.S. workforce!

To sort the data in the table, you just need to click the column headings - you can sort either alphabetically by college major or numerically by average starting salary. To re-sort the data in reverse order, just click the column heading again!

2008 Starting Salaries for Recent College Graduates

Degree / Major

Average Starting Salary

Accounting

$47,413

Chemistry

$52,125

Communications

$35,196

Computer Science

$56,921

Economics

$52,926

Engineering - All

$56,336

Engineering - Chemical

$63,749

Engineering - Civil

$49,427

Engineering - Electrical

$56,512

Engineering - Mechanical

$56,429

English

$34,757

Finance

$48,795

History

$35,956

Human Resources

$40,250

Journalism

$32,250

Liberal Arts - All

$33,258

Management

$43,823

Marketing

$43,459

Nursing

$52,129

Political Science

$43,594

Psychology

$30,877

Public Relations

$30,667

Having sorted the data by salary, we noticed an interesting trend - namely, that liberal arts majors fall into the bottom of the barrel when it comes to making a decent amount of money upon entering the workforce.

In fact, if we draw the line right above History majors, we find that there is a significant gap between these college graduates and their more business and technically-oriented peers. So, what's the difference between the educations that can be obtained through these programs that might account for the large discrepancies that we observe in the table above?

Could it be productivity? Since we would expect people who are more productive to have higher earning power and consequently, a greater ability to command a higher starting salary when entering the workforce, could this explain the difference?

We find the answer here is no. Consider that every academic major graduates students who have never obtained real world work experience, and therefore, have never demonstrated their relative level of productivity compared to other students. Yet, the students in the business and technical fields will still outmatch their liberal arts peers in starting salaries, even with identical grades. So we see that productivity doesn't factor in much at this level - although, we should note that it does play a factor within majors. Students who do obtain real world experience in their fields through internships, co-op programs or other employment are able to command higher starting salaries than their peers within their fields who do not.

Let's take a step backward. The primary purpose of an accredited college education is to provide students with a means of demonstrating to others that they have acquired a given body of knowledge. So there must be something inherent in the body of knowledge that the student acquires that accounts for the discrepancy in starting salaries. What is it that the students in business and technically-oriented degrees are getting that the graduates of liberal arts are not?

The answer may be found by considering just what it takes to be successful in life. The two things anyone needs to achieve great success are: great ideas and great execution.

Here, an individual can have the greatest idea ever, but unless they can turn it into something real (execution), they'll never achieve great success. Likewise, someone can have a lousy idea, but through great execution, achieve a moderate amount of success.

The ideal combination, of course, is to blend a great idea with great execution.

Where this applies to starting salaries for students with recently minted college degrees is that the technical and business-oriented degress all share a common characteristic - they demand the ability to execute ideas into reality.

Meanwhile, the liberal arts programs are big on ideas, but are not so much when it comes to execution. And therein we find why liberal arts majors just don't fare very well in the salary department when entering the job market.

How Much Is That Idea Worth?

We featured the following tool some time ago, and since it relates to this discussion, we present it here so you can find out for yourself how much various combinations of awful-to-brilliant ideas and lousy-to-great execution matters in determining how much value an idea potentially has:

Welcome to the blogosphere's toolchest! Here, unlike other blogs dedicated to analyzing current events, we create easy-to-use, simple tools to do the math related to them so you can get in on the action too! If you would like to learn more about these tools, or if you would like to contribute ideas to develop for this blog, please e-mail us at:

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